A Quiet Revolution (10 page)

In July
1952
, a group of military officers who included the future pres- idents of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, toppled the government, sent King Farouk into exile, and took power. Calling themselves the Free Officers, they consisted of a band of officers who had secretly pledged to drive the British out of Egypt. The impetus for their formation had come in
1942
, when the British surrounded the king’s palace with tanks and ordered him to appoint the man they wanted as prime minister. This, Sadat would later write, was an inci- dent “that our generation cannot forget.” Sadat and Nasser and others among the Free Officers also had served in the war with Israel in
1948
. The Arabs’ humiliating defeat by Israel, along with the deaths of com- rades, which they blamed on government incompetence and negli-

gence, further strengthened the Free Officers’ resolve.
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On July
23
,
1952
, as Farouk sailed in his yacht from Alexandria and into exile, the officers announced to the Egyptians that they were under new govern- ment.

When they first came to power the Free Officers had the support of the Brotherhood, for among the officers were men, most notably Sadat and Nasser, who had had close connections with the Brotherhood in the
1940
s. The Brotherhood had even been expecting to share in the Free

Officers’ powers after the coup.
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However, this did not come to pass, and when the new government failed, under Nasser’s leadership, to move toward instituting an Islamic state, Brotherhood members grew vocally critical. In
1954
, as Nasser was delivering a speech celebrating the with-

drawal of the last British troops from Egypt, he was the target of an as- sassination attempt—an attempt that the government said had been carried out by the Brotherhood.

The Nasser government banned the organization (as the previous government had done) and arrested its leaders, as well as many thou- sands of its members. It would continue this policy, with growing feroc- ity, through the
1950
s and
1960
s, culminating in the imprisonment and

torture of some of the Brotherhood’s leading figures. These included two

figures of major importance to the Muslim Brotherhood. One was Zainab al-Ghazali, who, although she never held any official position in the organization, is commonly viewed as a major figure in the history of the Brotherhood. Ghada Talhami, in her study of the Islamic mobiliza- tion of women, notes that some consider al-Ghazali to be one of the three most important leaders of the Brotherhood, and Roxanne Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman even assert that “if Hasan al-Banna is the fa- ther of the contemporary Islamist movement,” al-Ghazali can be char- acterized as “its largely unsung mother.”
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The other important figure in the history of the Brotherhood ar- rested in the Nasser era was Sayyid Qutb, the organization’s leading in- tellectual and ideologue. He would be imprisoned and tortured twice over the course of the fifties and sixties, and was executed in
1966
. Qutb

is most widely known as a thinker and philosopher and as the author of books that have inspired Islamist militants. Al-Ghazali admired his work and taught it in the seminars she ran. Nevertheless, in her own activism she espoused and committed herself to advancing the Islamist cause through outreach and education, and she typically represented herself as opposed to the use of violence.

Through these years of persecution by the Nasser government, many among the Brotherhood’s leadership, as well as among its rank and file, fled into exile. A significant number among them went to Saudi Ara- bia and other Arab Gulf countries, where they were generally wel- comed. The Brotherhood’s socially conservative outlook and deep commitment to Islam was in consonance with the Wahhabi perspective on Islam that was dominant in Saudi Arabia, as well as with the less strictly conservative forms of Islam that were prevalent elsewhere in the Arabian Peninsula. Brotherhood members were additionally wel- come because they typically were well-educated people—engineers, chemists, doctors, scientists, and teachers. Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf countries in the fifties and sixties had recently begun to develop their oil fields, and with their accumulating wealth they were seeking to invest in, among other things, the social development of their soci- eties, including the establishment of schools and colleges. So this influx

of educated manpower was a valuable resource in the Arabian oil states’ pursuit of these goals.

The Nasser era (
1954
–
69
) was a politically turbulent time, as well as a period of social transformation in Egypt and in the region. In the fifties Nasser participated, alongside Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Tito of Yugoslavia, in the Bandung Conference and in other meet- ings of the “non-aligned nations,” as they called themselves. Such meet- ings were often accompanied by and concluded with deep criticisms of Western colonialism—statements that, along with their accompanying attitudes, were not welcomed by the Western powers.

In addition, Nasser now believed that he needed to arm his coun- try in the face of Israel’s growing military capacities. When Western na- tions placed conditions he considered unacceptable on the sale of arms to Egypt (France, for example, demanded that he cease supporting the

Algerian revolution), Nasser turned to the Soviet Union. In
1955
he

signed an arms deal with Czechoslovakia.

This move angered the United States, which responded by abruptly withdrawing, on July
19
,
1956
, the funding it had promised for the con- struction of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam. Nasser reacted swiftly, national- izing the Suez Canal on July
26
. The canal’s revenues would now be used, he proclaimed, to build the High Dam. Loudly condemning the canal’s nationalization, Britain and France joined with Israel in an attack on Egypt in October. The city of Port Said was bombarded, and Egyptian ca- sualties were high. Both the United States and the Soviet Union con- demned the attack, and the U.S. called for an immediate ceasefire.

The attack brought worldwide condemnation of the attackers, as well as sympathy and admiration, particularly in the colonized and for- merly colonized Third World, for Egypt’s valiant stand against this brazen imperial aggression. Furthermore, it precipitated Nasser onto the world stage as a leading figure in the struggle against imperialism. In the Arab world in particular, writes historian Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, he became an adulated figure who stood for “unity among Arab peoples, pride in self, an end to colonial influence, independence.” After the Suez War, she continues, Nasser’s picture “was to be found in every shop and bazaar in all Arab countries.”
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Arab nationalism, as embodied in the anti-imperialist and anti- Israeli positions and rhetoric espoused by Nasser, became a powerful force across many Arab countries throughout the fifties and into the mid- sixties. Several such countries had just emerged or were in the process of emerging from British or French domination. The French army had left Syria in
1946
, and France declared Algeria independent in
1962
. Iraq, under British control and of compelling interest to them because of its vast oil reserves (British and American oil companies already held huge stakes there), remained under British control through a series of coups and uprisings until—and indeed beyond—the army coup of
1958
, which overthrew the Iraqi monarchy installed by the British. Egypt’s monarch and its government, viewed as both corrupt and unable to free them- selves of the shackles of British control, had been overthrown in the Rev- olution of
1952
.

Also among the political and ideological currents sweeping across much of the Arab region was a commitment by the new wave of rulers to socialism and to sweeping away classist attitudes, as well as to pan- Arab nationalism. In Egypt this would result in land reforms which al- lowed the confiscation of the agricultural properties of large landowners (over a certain acreage) and the redistribution of the land to agricultural workers. It also resulted in the nationalization of factories and in policy changes that introduced new opportunities for the working classes. For instance, the government now made education, from primary school through university level, free for all who qualified.

The trend toward socialism in Egypt was not, however, accompa- nied by a Soviet-style rejection of religion. On the contrary, the Nasser regime was well aware of the importance of religion and of laying claim to and acquiring legitimacy and authority through appeals to religion. From early on, for example, the Free Officers would sometimes preach the Fri-

day sermon, and Nasser and other members of the government were often photographed in mosques at prayer. Similarly, in
1954
Nasser made a pil- grimage to Mecca, an event that was widely reported on in the media. In addition, Nasser also frequently delivered important speeches in mosques,

including the mosque of al-Azhar. It was from here, for example, during the Suez crisis, that he delivered a powerful and memorable speech that galvanized the country in resistance to the tripartite attack.
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The Nasser regime took measures to exert its influence over the country’s religious institutions to bring them into line with its ideologies. New laws were enacted to give the government greater control over the prestigious and internationally renowned Islamic al-Azhar University, for example—an imposition of government control that prompted some officials and professors at al-Azhar to resign in protest. Many did not, though, and some Islamic scholars began publishing books and articles supporting and justifying government policies in Islamic terms.
20
So- cialism, for example, some Islamic scholars now maintained, was deeply grounded in Islamic ideals, ideals that exhorted Muslims to create a so- ciety in which the poor were free from hunger and need and exploitation and injustice.

Nevertheless, the drift toward socialism was in part a sign of grow- ing Soviet interest and influence in the region. Naturally growing Soviet influence was a matter of concern to Britain and the United States in re- lation to the Middle East in general, but most specifically in relation to the oil-rich countries of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The political currents of the day had already swept away two Arab monarchies and replaced them with regimes that were fiercely anti-imperialist. Moreover, the Arab na- tionalist rhetoric of the time, and in particular that emanating from Egypt, was specifically targeting the monarchy and ruling powers of Saudi Arabia. Nasser denounced Saudi Arabia’s rulers as allies of im- perialism and, in particular, of the United States. He described the government as supporting “imperialist causes” and as “impeding the lib- eration of the struggling Islamic nations.” He went on also to assert that the form of Islam that they were enforcing in their country was a “feu- dalistic,” nonegalitarian form of Islam that was “reactionary and stifling” and would lead only to “retardation and decline.”
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Nor did Nasser confine his attacks on Saudi Arabia to rhetoric. By the early sixties he was sending contingents of the Egyptian army to sup- port a revolutionary, socialist, and anti-royalist war in Yemen, a coun- try on Saudi Arabia’s southern border. To counter Nasser’s support for the revolutionaries, Saudi Arabia now vigorously supported the Yemeni monarchy.

These were not matters that Saudi Arabia and its allies took lightly. Other monarchies in the region had toppled and been replaced by gov-

ernments whose ideologies were pan-Arabist, anti-imperialist, and in- clined toward socialism. Saudi royalty feared that such winds might sweep through their own country.

Through the fifties Saudi Arabia was beginning to emerge as a new economic force in the region. Drawing on their gathering wealth, the Saudi regime now began its efforts to counter the wave of Arab nation- alism and socialism sweeping the region, and to respond to and under- mine the Nasserite ideology that was making such gains in the Arab world. The objective was to spread instead its own ideological commit- ments, including to the form of Islam, Wahhabi Islam, that prevailed in the Saudi kingdom. The struggle between these two blocs, the royalist Saudis on the one hand and the Arab nationalists and socialists on the other, most starkly epitomized and represented by the struggle for power between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, would later come to be dubbed (by Malcolm Kerr and others) the Arab Cold War.
22
These local struggles also directly involved obviously the two sides of the global Cold War who, in these years, were contending for power and influence here and elsewhere across the world.

Saudi Arabia’s moves to counter pan-Arabism and Nasserite ide- ology with its own religious and ideological commitments would prove to be of momentous importance to the rise and spread of the Islamic Resurgence and of course, therefore, of the veil. Consequently, Saudi Arabia and the religious and ideological commitments it now set about promoting and propagating play key roles in the story that I tell in this book.

Saudi Arabia pursued its goals in part through the founding of or- ganizations and institutions that would prove to be of key importance to the work of spreading Saudi ideology. Thus in
1961
the Saudis instituted a new university in Medina whose objective was the training of Muslim missionaries. And in
1962
they began to pursue the goal of establishing a new transnational organization, the Muslim World League (Rabitat al- ‘Alam al-Islami).

The first meeting took place in Mecca after the completion of that year’s pilgrimage. This meeting brought together scholars, intellectuals, and politicians from across the Muslim world. It was convened to “discuss the affairs of the Islamic Ummah in view of the threats posed to it by